Saturday Afternoon Long Read -- The Silencing of the Hillary Clinton Supporter

As we know now, only 43 percent of white women voted for Hillary, which of course had a major impact in the end. However the narrative being pushed by the right and even from some on the left is that Trump voters were predominantly middle and working class and disenfranchised, and that she ignored them. According to The Atlantic Monthly’s Derek Thompson, that is a dangerous myth. “Hillary Clinton talked about the working class, middle-class jobs, and the dignity of work constantly. And she still lost,” Thompson writes. “She detailed plans to help coal miners and steel workers. She had decades of ideas to help parents, particularly working moms, and their children. She had plans to help young men who were getting out of prison and old men who were getting into new careers. She talked about the dignity of manufacturing jobs, the promise of clean-energy jobs … She offered the most comprehensively progressive economic platform of any presidential candidate in history—one specifically tailored to an economy powered by an educated workforce.”

Over the past many months, I have spoken with many middle and lower-middle class women, who shared stories with me about why they voted for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, including a 34-year veteran school teacher who is so news-obsessed, she has her friends text her news alerts while she’s on vacation, and a 24-year-old college student who “kind of liked” Bernie until she realized that the U.S. was one of the few civilized countries that had never had a woman leader. We’ve seen the millions of women who took to the streets the day after the inauguration. We’ve learned that it’s older women who make most of the calls to Congress, and we have heard that nearly 13,000 women want to run for office since Hillary lost the election. All this while the media has mostly ignored the 90 percent of Black women—many of them lower, working, and middle class—who voted for Hillary. And yet, six months later, the media continues to fixate on the white working-class voters who didn’t cast theirs for her in the autopsy of the 2016 election.